| John Oliver Simon | |
John Oliver Simon is a fifth-generation Californian who was born in New York City in 1942. His books of poetry include Roads To Dawn Lake (Oyez, 1968), Rattlesnake Grass (Hanging Loose, 1976), Neither of Us Can Break the Other's Hold: Poems For My Father (Shameless Hussy, 1981), Lord of the House of Dawn (Bombshelter, 1991), Son Caminos (poems in Spanish, Hotel Ambosmundos, Mexico City, 1997) and the forthcoming Caminante (Creative Arts, 2001). He is also a widely published translator and is a contributing editor of Poetry Flash and The Temple. The Blue That Sustains the Song, his account of travels among the poets of Chile, is online at ZYZZYVA.
Here's a poem:
John Oliver SimonALL OVER THE PLACE
for Donald Schenker
Don says there's poems all over the place,
it's practically embarrassing, and I nod
without enthusiasm, driving into downtown
Oakland thinking yeah, those two pigeons
squatting on the blue-gray sign HOTEL MORO,
how the part of it that's a poem could fall out
between the word and the bird, or the word Moro
all the way back to the reconquest of Spain
and all the bloody hemisphere ending up
on this block I don't care if I see again.
Don says he could just stop anyone
and look at them, they're all so deep
and beautiful, and I say what's interesting
is the stories they all carry around
stranger than fiction, stronger than truth
all these gente waiting to cross the street
each one forgetting their great-grandparents
each one forgetting to tell their children
and I'm no novelist, I can't move a
character across the room, much less two guys
to lunch at a Vietnamese place on Webster.
Over bowls of translucent noodles and odd meat
Don says he always felt like the other poets
were the big boys, and I see how the grand
famous names of his peers, now pushing sixty
have turned into the padded artifacts
of their own careers, while Don's obscurity
has kept him fresh and sweet, and Don says
he loves his tumors, the big one that hurts
in his left hip, the one that's hammering out
among sparse hairs inside his baseball cap,
and though it's his own death that gives him truth
I'm stuck in my heart without any words
while poems in Vietnamese are fluttering up
from all the restaurant tables around us
and escaping into so much empty light.
